Nearly a Year

It will be a year tomorrow, I think (or Tuesday) that I lost my best friend, the person closest to my heart, someone I never thought would hurt me, in my wildest dreams.  Tonight the pain is as great as when it happened.  When it happened, when I knew, I had just finished up cleaning the bathroom after having been sick from chemotherapy, and had cleared the bathtub of my hair that had fallen out.  It was not the scenario to receive an email like the one I did.  He knew how ill I was, too.  I can only hope, much as I love this person, that one day he will "get it" that he engaged in something wrong and unfair, and say he is sorry to me without tagging on, "It's your own fault for this."  There is personal responsibility and then there is shifting the blame for enormously unfair behavior onto someone else.  The other party to it moved out of the county partially from fear, which makes me even sadder....why detonate every thing you have, and what other people have, in the name of delusions? His family were the decent ones who treated me kindly and at least didn't shut me out in the cold.

It's hard to realize you can be with someone for a long time, have them know you well, and find out that really, you meant so little to them and that years of devotion and kindness could be repaid with such cruelty and indifference.  I am still piecing together all the shrapnel from that time: I often say it will take another couple of years to feel in any sense whole.

Still, as I have said endlessly, this sense of feeling fractured and sad, which does not happen as often these days (but it's the anniversary) will help me write about Asha.  I hope she wasn't as sad as I am about it all, but I suspect it wasn't fun for her to leave her husband and her home, find a room in a house with a bunch of roommates, and all through it be in the early stages of a pregnancy and try to figure out how she was going to live.

And so I imagine holding tenderness and strength in both our hands, because women keep going forward despite everything against them in this world.  We have strength and courage, and I refuse to let any person try to make me feel "less than".